In a recent episode of Act Out! host Eleanor Goldfield reported on the surprising intersection of the prison reform movement and environmental activism.

Plans to build a $444 million maximum security prison at the site of a disused mountaintop removal coal mine in Kentucky brought these two groups together in a protest Monday in Washington, D.C., where activists marched on the Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice.

In a lawsuit filed on February 24th, the mother of Brandon Clint Hacker claims that a “continuing policy, pattern, custom and/or practice of … willfully and deliberately ignoring the medical needs of inmates of the Jail” contributed to the death of her 35-year-old son at Kentucky’s Madison County Detention Center (MCDC).

ACH is in the midst of a $222,000 contract to provide healthcare at MCDC. According to their website, the Illinois-based contractor oversees inmate medical care in 17 states and works with “adults, juveniles, and Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees on behalf of jails, juvenile detention centers, work release centers, methadone clinics, and more.”

The Bureau of Prisons contacted me Friday, assigning me a prison number and a new address: for the next 90 days, beginning Saturday I’ll live at FMC Lexington, in the satellite prison camp for women, adjacent to Lexington’s Federal Medical Center for Men. Very early Saturday morning, Buddy Bell, Cassandra Dixon, and Paco and Silver, two house guests whom we first met in protests on South Korea’s Jeju Island, traveled with me to Kentucky and deliver me to the prison gates.

In December, 2014, Judge Matt Whitworth sentenced me to three months in federal prison after Georgia Walker and I had attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the commander of Whiteman Air Force Base, asking him to stop his troops from piloting lethal drone flights over Afghanistan from within the base. Judge Whitworth allowed me over a month to surrender myself to prison; but whether you are a soldier or a civilian, a target or an unlucky bystander, you can’t surrender to a drone.